


renewal

by polkadot



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-27 05:53:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8389729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polkadot/pseuds/polkadot
Summary: After the death of their husbands, Tonks and Fleur grieve, heal, and look to the future.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magnetgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnetgirl/gifts).



It is three months since the Battle of Hogwarts. Three months since Tonks’s world changed forever.

And yet in so many ways Tonks’s world is still the same. The little flat she sits in, staring vacantly at the sunshine playing on the floor, is the little flat she and Remus found together, laughing at how Remus bumped his head on the door frame; the leaky pipe under the kitchen sink is the one he kept vowing to fix (and which Tonks was actually the one who kept fixing – not the fixes ever seemed to stick); the creaky bed is the bed they made creak together. The garden is the same garden that Remus spent a Saturday planting, only a few weeks ago, just before Teddy was born; his watering charms have outlived him, and the courgette plants are coming up strong. 

(One day Tonks looks out the kitchen window and sees that the flowers are orange, when yesterday they were purple; she realizes that they are spelled to change colours. The gentle joke is so Remus that she catches at the edge of the sink so hard that her fingers turn white, as she rides out the swell of grief, blinking back hot tears.)

Teddy is not the same. He changes day by day, and she clutches him fiercely against her same-not same world. He is her everything now. His baby smiles can make her forget, for a moment, the gaping hole in her life. (And then she calls for Remus to come and look, and her heart breaks all over again.)

The wizarding world is in shock just like she is. So many are dead. So many. 

If there were fewer casualties, more people might visit, might try to force her out of the flat, into the fresh air, into what they call ‘healing’. But this is where she feels closest to Remus; and Tonks doesn’t want to go to St. Mungo’s, doesn’t want to sit in a sterile treatment room with a specialist who will tell her that grief is a natural process, but that she should not let it take over her life, that she has Teddy to live for now. She knows all that. 

Her mother visits three times a week. Tonks knows she would like to come by more; knows Andromeda would move into the flat in an instant if Tonks asked, or let Tonks and Teddy move in with her. But Tonks isn’t ready for another human being in her space, and she can’t look at her mother without flinching. She knows that her mother is not Bellatrix Lestrange, is not the woman who struck down Tonks’s husband and destroyed her world, but there it is: she flinches. 

Three months after the Battle of Hogwarts, there is a memorial service. Tonks almost doesn’t go. She almost stays in her warm, cluttered flat, with Teddy gurgling on his blanket on the floor (Molly gave it to her when Tonks started showing, hand-knitted and full of love), and the bookcases of well-worn, well-loved texts (with marginalia in a firm, familiar hand), and the cupboards full of jumpers that still smell of him (if she closes her eyes and imagines). She almost hides, as she has done ever since Molly screamed and ran across the Great Hall, threw herself down beside Bill’s body, and Tonks looked over them to see the still body of her husband lying just beyond.

But Remus knew all about hiding, and about standing up and fighting. She thinks he would have gone, if it had been her lying on that cold floor, no matter how hard he found it. He would have gone, for her.

Tonks dresses Teddy in the dress robes Minerva gave them when he was born, miniscule copies of his parents’. He grizzles and fusses, unaccustomed to being dressed up or having shoes on his feet, and she cuddles him close until he laughs and chortles. He is a happy baby. She wonders if Remus was a happy baby, once.

At the memorial service, she hangs back. There are many more famous wizards than she, and no one is looking in the direction of an anonymous, deliberately drab witch doing her Metamorphmagus best to be nondescript. Not when Harry is there, looking thin and haunted, with Hermione and Ron next to him, hand-in-hand. Not when Kingsley, the new Minister for Magic, says some beautifully eloquent words that Tonks scarcely hears, bouncing Teddy to keep him quiet and focusing on keeping her calm, here in the shadow of the place he died.

After his elegy, Kingsley gives out Orders of Merlin. At first Tonks thinks it is out of place, to give out medals at a memorial service; but when she thinks about it longer, it seems fitting. These Orders of Merlin could never be presented at a glittering gala, with toasts and shouts of acclamation and boisterous applause. These recognize service during wartime, and there is no more solemn or fitting moment than now.

So many of them are posthumous. 

Tonks loses the battle with her tears around the time Molly accepts two medals, one for herself and one for Fred. Once the tears come, they will not stop; they roll down her cheeks, huge and fast, and she sobs quietly into Teddy’s robes.

She cries for Remus, for the life they had and for the life they never will have; for dreams deferred and dreams denied; for the way he smiled in his sleep and the way he drifted off into daydreams; for the way he looked at her when she got dressed in the morning; for the way he held her when she was frightened. She cries for the passion they shared and the love that grew between them, for the flowers that change colours in her garden and the leaky pipe under her sink, for the baby that is half-Remus and will never know him. She cries because she never knew just how much Remus brightened her life until he was ripped away from her; and now his light is gone.

“Here,” a voice says, its accent compassionate, and Tonks feels gentle arms embrace her and Teddy. “Come here, ma petite.”

Tonks rests her head on Fleur’s shoulder and lets the tears come, as Fleur rubs her back, soothing and rhythmic, saying things in French that Tonks doesn’t understand. 

In her grief she had not thought – but Tonks is not the only young widow in these postwar days. She is not the only one grieving not only a past, but a potential future: grieving not only what was, but all the many years that were yet to come. When she remembers seeing Remus lying on the floor of the Great Hall, so silent and still, she remembers seeing Bill next to him, lying almost near enough to touch hands. They had been guarding each other’s backs, before they fell; Tonks knew Fleur only a little in life, but she feels like she knows her more now, united in grief.

“He’s calling you,” Fleur says, her lilt apologetic, and it takes Tonks a moment to interpret the words, to realize that there is a hush over the crowd, and that they are all waiting for her.

Because of course, she shouldn’t have expected to be allowed to remain anonymous. She is a war hero and the widow of a war hero; her grief is public sorrow and private pain, and now they want her to walk up to the front, in front of all these people, and accept an Order of Merlin for Remus – for herself too, perhaps, she hasn’t been listening – with everyone watching, with everyone seeing her grief. 

She panics for a moment, clutching Fleur closer.

Fleur draws back, stroking her hair gently; then, at something she sees in Tonks’s face, says, “I will go with you,” and slips her arm through Tonks’s.

Having Fleur at her side helps give Tonks some of the strength she needs. Remus gives her some more, as she thinks of how he would hate this, of how he would make self-deprecating jokes about public-appearance anxiety when they got home, of how he would wax darkly humorous about the wizarding Powers That Be giving an Order of Merlin to a werewolf, after all those years of bigotry and exile. 

And then there is Teddy, gurgling in her arms, kicking his fat little legs. He’s managed to lose a shoe somewhere.

For Teddy and for Remus, she walks down the centre aisle, her head held high, arm in arm with Fleur. She accepts the Orders of Merlin from Kingsley, withstanding the impulse to hang Remus’s around Teddy’s neck. (He would pop it straight in his mouth, and that’s surely not sanitary.) She watches Fleur accept two as well; and then it is done.

When their ordeal is over and attention has swung to Neville Longbottom, Fleur walks Tonks and Teddy to the back and says, “Let me take you home.”

“Please,” Tonks says, her voice raw.

~

Back at the flat, Fleur holds Teddy while Tonks goes and changes, washing her face in cold water. She has felt numb for months, aware of the flood of sorrow that threatens to overwhelm her, keeping its roar a breath away. Now she feels raw, as if sandpaper has been scraped across every inch of her skin, inside and out - and tired, oh so tired. 

When she comes back into the little living room, Fleur is bouncing Teddy on her knee, singing something rhythmic and French. He laughs, charmed, and Tonks smiles, even as her eyes prick with tears again. Merlin’s beard, she’s a right mess.

“Sit down,” Fleur says, and shepherds her into the plumpest armchair, the one that Remus used to love. He’d fall asleep there sometimes, his finger still marking his place in whatever book or article he was reading. She’d tuck a blanket around him and turn off the light. 

Fleur hands her Teddy, and she automatically takes him, holding him close.

“I will make tea,” Fleur says. “This I have learned, in this country it is always good to make tea.”

Tonks laughs, a weak hiccoughing laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. “Yes. Please. Two sugars.”

“I will put three,” Fleur declares, and vanishes to the kitchen.

While she’s gone, Tonks takes off Teddy’s robes, changes his nappy, and puts him in a fresh babygro. He kicks his feet happily, glad to be more comfortable, and she presses a kiss to his forehead. _At least I have him_ , she thinks. Fleur, humming in the kitchen – Fleur doesn’t have Bill’s baby, only her memories.

Fleur brings her the tea, and Tonks thanks her, putting Teddy down on his blanket. She sips tea, and watches Fleur (who’s settled gracefully on the threadbare sofa). There are so many things she could say, and yet they all seem superfluous. 

Oh, she knows Fleur to some extent. They were friends during the war, or friendly acquaintances at least; the war forged a sense of comradeship between all members of the Order of the Phoenix. And Tonks knows full well that Fleur’s gentle beauty is backed by genuine steel: she was a Triwizard Champion before she became a guerrilla insurgent, and neither was an occupation for the faint of heart. 

But small talk seems almost indecent now, after the memorial service. 

“I’m sorry I made a scene at the service,” she says, softly.

Fleur snorts, so unladylike and surprising a sound that Tonks looks up sharply. “It is more surprising to me that everyone did not cry. Maybe they have cried all their tears already. Me, I cried all morning, and still I was not sure I would not cry again. The tears, they come at the most pesky of times.”

Tonks knows what she means. You expect to cry in the darkness of the night, in your cold empty bed. You don’t expect to cry while washing dishes (because you see a chip on a plate and remember him chipping it), or when hearing an upbeat pop song (because he used to sing it to you, even though he couldn’t carry a tune, just to make you laugh), or over fresh tomatoes at the shop, as everyone stares at you (because fresh tomatoes were his favorite).

“Someday I will cry less,” Fleur says, smiling at Teddy and making him giggle. “For now I cry, but I also live. Because Bill, he would want me to live. He would want me to smile and laugh, because he liked that. So for him, I try.”

Remus was so tired, there at the end. But some of Tonks’ fondest memories are of shared laughter. Even in the midst of battle and danger, even while she was so worried about the little family they had started, there had been moments of quiet joy. 

She smiles at Fleur. It’s shaky, but it’s a start.

Fleur smiles back. Her beauty is a fact of life, thanks to her Veela genes, but today it looks more human, exhausted and flawed; and yet more attractive for it. “Good. Crying we can do, but giving up – no.”

Tonks salutes solemnly, but can’t keep a straight face; her smile grows. 

“Now I will go to the shop,” Fleur announces, picking Teddy up and settling him on her hip. “Teddy will come with me. You will rest.”

Tonks isn’t a child – she doesn’t need to be treated as if she’s fragile, or to be looked after. Her mother would have done that, and happily. But Fleur doesn’t look at her as if she’s a child. Fleur looks at her in fellow-feeling, as if they’re members in the world’s shittiest club: Women Whose Husbands Have Been Killed By Murderous Psychopathic Evil Wizards. Fleur looks at her in solidarity, and Tonks feels less alone.

“Okay,” she says, still trying to keep her brave, watery smile. A shower sounds good. And with Teddy safe in Fleur’s care, maybe she’ll be able to really rest, without keeping one ear cocked for any sudden noises. (Whether that be him somehow climbing out of his cot, or the sudden descent of Death Eaters come to kill her and take Teddy away, which her brain still fears beyond all reason.)

When Tonks wakes up from her nap, warm and rested, the flat smells wonderful. In the kitchen, Fleur is busy icing a cake; Teddy waves at Tonks from his high chair. 

There is a little flour on Fleur’s cheek. She looks up at Tonks and smiles. “I have baked a cake,” she announces. “Cake makes everything better. This is what Molly says, and I think she is right.”

“I think she’s right too,” Tonks agrees, and bends to kiss Teddy’s forehead.

~

After that day, things are never quite the same again.

Tonks still grieves, still cries. She still wakes up in the middle of the night and reaches unthinkingly out to Remus; she still calls out to show him things, before she remembers. 

But her days are no longer as lonely or as alone. Fleur moves into her life effortlessly, gracefully; she makes tea and bakes cakes and bounces Teddy on her knee, and before Tonks knows it she’s a part of their life in an unexpected but wholly welcome way.

~

It is six months since the Battle of Hogwarts.

“Tell me,” Fleur says one day, poking her head into the living room. “How can it be that one pipe can be dripping so much?”

Tonks laughs, and comes to look. “Maybe I should get a Muggle plumber. My spells are obviously not working.”

Fleur’s expression is dubious. “A Muggle plumber would run away. This flat is not Muggle.”

“True,” Tonks says, with a sigh. 

There’s a picture of Remus over the mantle, looking up from his books and smiling. Teddy’s cot is charmed to prevent him climbing out or getting his head stuck between the slats. The grandfather clock (a wedding gift from Minerva) talks. Fleur often has a washing-up charm going in the sink. And that’s only the beginning.

“Hermione will know what book to read,” Fleur says, decisively. “Or she will find out.”

It’s a good idea. Tonks doesn’t know Hermione as well as she would like to, but she knows her well enough to believe that if there’s a book that could help her with her plumbing problems (preferably a magical book with household charms, but in a pinch Tonks could even be brought to learning things the Muggle way), she’ll be able to find it. 

“How is Hermione these days?” she asks idly, sitting on her kitchen table and swinging her legs.

Fleur usually tells her off for that, putting her hands on her hips or laughingly pointing a mixing spoon at her, but today she lets it slide. “She is good,” she says. There is a pucker between her eyebrows. “She and Ron – they will elope soon, I think. They are too young, but with the war ‘too young’ is forgotten. And they do not want much celebration, not now.”

Not with two of Ron’s brothers dead.

“I wish them every happiness,” Tonks says. Her voice sounds small. She does wish them joy, she does; only she remembers when she was a young bride, with her whole life before her.

Usually Fleur would pick up on her mood and try to make her laugh (she has an unerring ear for when Tonks’s voice starts to thicken with incipient tears), but today she seems pensive herself. “I think,” she says, slowly, “that I will give them Shell Cottage.”

Tonks hasn’t been to Shell Cottage since the war’s end. She remembers it as a lovely place, a haven of peace and beauty. She can picture it in her mind’s eye, the last day she was there, with Fleur standing in front of the door waving goodbye, and Bill standing behind with his hands on her waist and his chin propped on the top of her head. They always fit together so well, Fleur and Bill. She remembers the way Bill used to look at Fleur, soft and warm, and the way Fleur looked at Bill, laughing and protective.

“It is a Weasley cottage, after all,” Fleur says. “And I am not really a Weasley.”

“I’m sure they still think of you as a daughter,” Tonks says, and reaches a hand out to rest it on Fleur’s shoulder. 

Fleur relaxes into the touch, though her face is still troubled. “Oh yes. Molly, she is like a mother to me, and I love them all. But I was only a Weasley for a little while. It should be a home for Weasleys.”

Tonks doesn’t know the Weasleys as well as she’d like, but she knows they would never ask Fleur to leave. She is their Bill’s wife, another daughter added into the boisterous clan. That wouldn’t change simply because Bill is gone. (Tonks ruthlessly stomps down on the ache that says that she never got to know Remus’s family.)

But looking at Fleur now, Tonks wonders if being ‘another Weasley daughter’ makes the grief more difficult, or at least more complicated. What must it be like to be part of a family, and you think it’s for life, but then everything changes and now every time you see them you can only think of the person who’s missing, the most important person. What must it be like to be a visible reminder of the gaping hole in the heart of a family? (George must know as well.)

“Every room has him,” Fleur says, almost in a whisper. “I love the cottage, but I think I must give it up, or I will live only in the past. I am too young. I do not wish to drown in my grief.”

Tonks can’t imagine giving up this flat. She never will, if she can help it. But grief takes everyone in different ways. “Where will you move?”

Fleur shrugs, an eloquent one-shouldered movement. “I have not thought. A city. There is too much quiet, in the country.”

“Well,” Tonks says, not stopping to think too much. She has always acted on impulse; she kissed Remus for the first time, surprising them both, on a sunlit rainy day when it just felt right. “You could move in with us.”

After the war’s end, when she was still waking up every night with the screaming nightmares, she would never have imagined having a roommate. But now, somehow, it feels right.

“You are sure?” Fleur asks, looking at her suspiciously. “This is not, as you say, a politeness? Because the British people, they say things that are not true, to be polite.”

Tonks turns her hands palms-up. “Maybe people do, but not me. I have extra room. You don’t want to try to find a place in London – it’s really hard. Besides,” she says, smiling, “Teddy loves you, and you make excellent cake.”

“Yes,” Fleur says, with a satisfied complacency, “I do.”

And so it is settled. A week later, Fleur is moving her things into the master bedroom, after cleaning out the cobwebs (Tonks has been sleeping in the nursery since Remus’s death, unable to face the memories). She sings as she works, and Teddy giggles and claps.

Tonks makes her tea.

~

It is nine months since the Battle of Hogwarts.

Teddy, a plump ten-month-old with an irrepressibly-curious streak (“he gets that from you,” Tonks’s mother says, smiling), has become extremely good at getting into everything. Tonks puts up a gate in the kitchen doorway, so that he can’t crawl his way underfoot while Fleur is baking.

For Fleur is trying to turn her love of baking into a career. “At least for now,” she says, laughing. She pretends to be a Muggle and takes classes with a fussily brilliant cake decorator, and then comes home and adds her own magical twists. Her cakes have included functioning Hogwarts Express trains, charmed Chocolate Frog leapfrog games, and (Tonks’s favorite) a Quidditch match. 

(That one still needs more practice. “If I can make it to work,” Fleur says, looking as intent as one can with a smudge of chocolate on one’s face, “I will be extremely rich.” Tonks agrees with her. Every little witch and wizard would want one – and every adult witch or wizard, for that matter, if Fleur charms their team colours on.)

Tonks and Teddy help to eat the rejects. 

Tonks has started to see more of their old friends again. Fleur is everyone’s favorite (especially since she started studying to be a baker, Tonks observes with a snort), and at least a couple nights a week someone drops by to sit at their kitchen table and lick cake batter spoons. 

At first Tonks fled to the nursery at the first polite opportunity, pleading a nappy emergency and letting Fleur handle the social necessities. But now she is learning how to be social once again; she finds herself laughing more often, and there is only the omnipresent ache in her heart, not the sudden rush of tears. She plays Exploding Snap with Percy and Gabrielle, and talks to Susan about Susan’s plans to become an Auror, and listens to Ginny’s stories about the trials of her final year at Hogwarts (not that Ginny is terrifically interested in academics; she’s already being heavily recruited by several Quidditch teams).

Tonks still cries, usually at the most random of things. One day she runs out of shampoo and breaks down, because she remembers the time she ran out of shampoo and Remus, half-asleep, threw clothes on and went to the shop for her, returning to hand it through the curtain. (Then he had joined her and she had forgotten to use the shampoo at all…)

She leans against the wall and lets the tears come. In the kitchen, Fleur is singing a French song to Teddy, who is trying to bang along in rhythm on his highchair. He’s going to grow up speaking two languages; but he’ll never know his father. 

The initial wild grief may have settled into a constant ache, but Tonks still misses Remus desperately, each and every day. 

~

“I need to do something with my life,” Tonks tells Fleur one day.

She has spent the last fortnight going through Remus’s books and old scrolls. Teddy, pulling himself up to a standing position with the help of handy bookshelves, has been beginning to develop a propensity for pulling books off the shelves, and so she decided a reorganization is in order. New shelves having been put together and installed on the walls above head height (with the help of both wizarding charms and Muggle carpentry), it has only remained to go through Remus’s library as she moved it to its new environs.

The task has been both difficult and illuminating.

Fleur, painstakingly noting infinitesimal measurement gradations in her spattered notebook, looks up. “You have Teddy.”

“Well, yes,” Tonks says, tickling him under the chin, “but that’s not enough. I want to _do_ something. You have your cakes.”

“I do not think it would be a good idea for you to make cake,” Fleur says, far too quickly.

(There may have been an incident in which only Hermione’s double-strong fireproofing charms – which she insisted on putting in for them when Fleur announced that she was turning professional – had saved a rather nasty fire. Tonks is almost as absentminded as Remus was, and she should never be left alone in charge of something in the oven.)

Tonks laughs. “No, not cake.” She’s sitting on the table, swinging her legs, feeding Teddy nutritious peas and carrots. (He would much rather have cake, but so far she’s holding strong.)

She doesn’t need to worry about money, not yet. Under Kingsley’s direction, the Ministry seized the assets of convicted Death Eaters and turned them into a fund for survivors. Even though many Death Eaters were wealthy, their assets didn’t stretch forever; but still her and Teddy’s settlement is enough to keep them for a few years. 

Money isn’t everything, though. For nine months Tonks has been one massive ball of grief and pain, constantly disintegrating. Now she’s growing stronger; now she’s beginning to feel herself again. She’ll always be missing a part of herself, perhaps. But she is still herself.

“Do you want to be an Auror again?” Fleur asks, tapping her quill against her notebook thoughtfully. 

Tonks shakes her head. She has had enough violence for seven lifetimes. Let the Harry Potters and Padma Patils and Ron Weasleys of the world chase the remaining Death Eater holdouts and protect the wizarding world from the lesser (but no less lethal) criminals. All desire Tonks had for that career went out of her when she fought in the Battle of Hogwarts, with men and women and children dying all around her, even before she saw Remus.

“They have more than enough people now,” she says, pausing to scoop mush off Teddy’s chin before it can drip onto his ‘spit happens’ bib (a present from Seamus). “The war gave everyone a lot of experience.”

Fleur bites her lip, a spasm moving across her face.

“I think I want to be an activist,” Tonks says.

“But the public speaking, you hate it,” Fleur says, immediately. 

Tonks watches the cold grey sky outside her kitchen window. Remus’s garden is dormant now. She hopes the flowers are perennials. “Yes,” she admits, wryly. “But I still want to.”

“What kind of activist?”

Tonks thinks about her husband’s journals. Perhaps she should have burned them unread, to protect his privacy. But he could have shielded them from her, and instead his privacy charms had inspected her and then vanished away, letting her in. 

The journals are full of love for her, yes, and she has cried over them several times. But that is not all.

“I want to be an activist for werewolf rights,” she says, quietly. “Our world is changing, and it’s time this changed too.”

Fleur says nothing for a long moment, and then she stretches a hand across the table, clasping it around Tonks’s wrist. “I think that is right.”

They sit for a minute in quiet harmony. Fleur’s fingers are warm and slightly sticky on Tonks’s skin; her face is full of nothing but support and love, and Tonks’s heart swells. She knew she would have Fleur’s support, and yet to have it confirmed makes everything real somehow. This is going to happen. She, Nymphadora Tonks, is ready to start making a difference in the world again.

Then Teddy lets loose with a loud shriek of laughter and an incomprehensible gabble. (Tonks doesn’t even need to look to know that their cat Béatrice, fluffy and aloof, has wandered into the room.) Fleur lets go of Tonks’s wrist and jumps up, going to the oven to check on her latest batch of fairy cakes, and the moment passes.

But Tonks still feels warm inside.

~

It is twelve months since the Battle of Hogwarts.

Tonks’s activist work is still in its infancy. There’s so much to research. Political realities: what different political factions value, and how to make your cause important to them; how to appeal to individual witches and wizards, who may never have thought too closely about nonhuman rights; how to draw connections between werewolf rights and the rights of other marginalized groups; how to gain allies, influence people, and win hearts and minds. Practical realities: what would progress look like? What do werewolves themselves want? (And what to do when werewolves are divided on an issue or a proposed solution?) How would progress be implemented? Personal realities: how to balance the neverending demands of advocacy with the need for a personal life? 

Tonks isn’t alone. After the Voldemort years, she isn’t the only person hungry for change. She has allies and compatriots. Sometimes they come to the flat, crowding around the kitchen table and cooing over Teddy, happily devouring the extra cake Fleur always has on hand. 

Fleur is Tonks’s rock. She doesn’t always have solutions – though Tonks has come to rely on her ability to spot logical flaws – but she’s an excellent listener. She doesn’t just listen, she _hears_ , which is a rare gift.

Teddy is walking – no, running – and looks more like Remus by the day. 

(Though not always; he’s apparently inherited his mother’s abilities. He can’t control his transformations yet, so Tonks never knows exactly what her little boy will look like today. It’s an adventure.)

The anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts has loomed in the back of her mind for weeks. Logically, it’s just another day; Tonks misses Remus each and every day, so the precise anniversary shouldn’t make that much difference. But she knows that grief isn’t logical, and she’s prepared for the worst.

Kingsley has declared the day to be a solemn day of remembrance. There are memorial services everywhere, with the biggest at Hogwarts, of course. Tonks and Fleur could have gone to any of them, to pay their respects and share their grief with others.

They stay home.

In the morning, Fleur says quietly, “You will tell me if you need anything.” 

It is not a question; Tonks looks at Fleur’s reddened eyes and nods. “You too,” she says, her voice a croak.

Fleur bakes. Tonks plays with Teddy, and if she holds him a little too tightly, he doesn’t squall. 

“They’re really gone,” Tonks says, over tea. It’s blustery outside. She watches the leaves swirl in the wind, and blinks back the beginning of tears.

“Yes,” Fleur says.

Twelve months ago today, their husbands lay side by side on the floor of the Great Hall. Twelve months ago today, their lives changed forever. 

Fleur puts a hand on top of Tonks’s wrist, her fingers cold. “But we are still here.”

“Fleur,” Tonks says, her voice catching, her throat full, and Fleur gets up and comes to hold her, warm and comforting. Tonks buries her face in Fleur’s jumper, letting the tears fall, and Fleur whispers soothing words in her ear, although she is crying too.

~

It is fifteen months since the Battle of Hogwarts.

Teddy, who is talking in both French and English – Tonks is going to have to learn French to fully understand her own son – is down for a nap, looking deceptively like an angelic cherub with his rosy pink cheeks and long eyelashes. Tonks, who’s going to have to charm marker drawings off both the walls and the cat (luckily Béatrice’s outraged yowl alerted them before he was able to do much in the latter direction), knows better.

Before tackling the cleanup, Tonks makes a cup of tea and sits in the warm kitchen, watching Fleur putting the finishing touches on a Harpies-themed cake for Ginny’s birthday. She’s not only perfected the charm that animates the Quidditch players, but for this special occasion she’s even charmed one of the Chasers to look like Ginny, to celebrate Ginny’s contract signing as well as her birthday.

“It looks wonderful,” Tonks says, warming her hands on her mug.

“You are always nice to me,” Fleur says. She looks happy and satisfied with her work, her cheeks flushed and a smile in her eyes.

“Well,” Tonks says, setting her mug down and coming to inspect the cake more closely, “you make it really easy to be nice to you.”

Later, she realises how easy it would have been for her to still be looking at the cake, and not to have looked up and caught sight of Fleur’s face at that exact moment. A second later, and she might have gone on in her comfortable oblivion. 

(But perhaps it was only a matter of time; perhaps if it had not been that moment, it would soon have been another. Tonks thinks so. What is meant to be, is meant to be.)

As it happens, she does look up. 

She sees Fleur blush; she sees the affection in Fleur’s eyes, before Fleur flushes more and looks away, unable to hold her gaze. 

They are standing very close. Tonks long ago lost her bubble of personal space when it comes to Fleur; the flat is small, and neither of them is standoffish. 

“Fleur,” Tonks says, and reaches out a hand, touches Fleur on the arm. 

“I…” Fleur tries, but can’t seem to finish.

“Fleur,” Tonks says again, and leans in to kiss her, gentle and sweet.

She has always acted on impulse; she is not thinking of it now, as Fleur kisses her back, in a kitchen that smells of chocolate and sugar, but she was the first one to kiss Remus too. When she knows, she knows; and she knows.

“Are you sure?” Fleur whispers.

Tonks gives it real thought, and finds that she is.

Remus will forever be in her heart, and she thinks a part of it will always ache. Her grief is not yet wholly gone, and perhaps it never will be. 

But Remus would be happy for her, she thinks. Back in the War, they knew that at any moment they might lose each other. They had made a solemn promise when they married that they wouldn’t grieve forever, if the War took one of them. “Don’t be alone,” Remus had said, holding her close. “I don’t want you to be alone.”

It had been an easy promise for Tonks to make, because she had always had a premonition that they would fall together, cornered like Harry’s parents or fighting to protect each other’s backs. 

When it had been Bill who fell at Remus’s back, and Tonks who was left to pick up the shattered remnants of her world, she had forgot her promise for a time, shell-shocked and broken. Slowly she has put herself back together, slowly she has healed; and now, in Fleur’s arms, she remembers, and she blinks back sudden tears.

“Yes,” she says, resting her forehead against Fleur’s. “I’m sure.”

“I am sure too,” Fleur says, and tilts her head to kiss her, slow and full.

Soon Teddy will wake up. Soon Tonks will need to clean Béatrice and the walls, and finish a memo she’s writing for Hermione. Soon they will all get dressed and go to Ginny’s birthday party, taking the Harpies cake with them.

For now, Tonks kisses Fleur, and Fleur tangles her fingers in Tonks’s hair. Grinning, Tonks grows it longer, and Fleur laughs into the kiss; Tonks slides an arm around her shoulders, holding her close.

Their pasts are shadowed and painful, their futures yet to be determined. But here in the present, they’re in a warm kitchen that smells of cake, and everything is bright. 

Tonks kisses Fleur, and feels the happiness bubble up inside her, effervescent.

It is fifteen months since the Battle of Hogwarts, and the first day of the rest of her life.

~


End file.
